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Sunday, April 10, 2011

Tomboy add-in: Table of Contents

Tomboy is a neat note taking software, combining simplicity and power. It works on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. A very interesting feature is that tomboy makes it super easy to link to other notes (like in a wiki, but better) and recognizes many URLs. So from one note, you are just one click away from any resources you like: another note, a web page, a file on your computer, an email, etc.

It's hard to navigate through long notes

After some time of usage I have a few rather long notes. I naturally organized them into sections and subsections. Sections are marked by a header with huge and bold font, and subsections with large and bold font. The same way HTML pages would render H2 and H3 headers. However navigating between sections by scrolling is not practical and a waste of time.

It's easy to write Tomboy add-ins

So I decided to write a Tomboy Addin that would scroll for me. It will display the Table of Content in a menu, and will jump to the selected section or subsection. Simple, yet powerful.

The add-in is available under GNU LGPL license. It means that you are free to use it, to modify it, to redistribute it, including modified copies; as long as you grant the same freedom to the others. You will find the source code at github/tomboy/branch/TableOfContent. To use it, you can also just drop the compiled TableOfContent.dll (rename it as TableOfContent.dll) into

for Linux: ~/.config/tomboy/addins/

for MacOS X: ~/Library/Preferences/Tomboy/

for Windows: %APPDATA%\Tomboy\config\

Then restart Tomboy.

I hope it is useful to you too. Enjoy!

UPDATE

2013-04-27
There have been over 2.000 downloads of TableOfContent.dll. It let me think that the add-in is widely used and well appreciated. Thanks!

Yes, though I think this would require some changes in the code base. Would you like to give it a try?

In the latest version you can access the table of content - in the tools menu (as before)- with Ctrl-Alt-1, then you can select with arrow up/down, and Enter to jump- in the mouse context menu (right click)

Hi Luc - I am running the latest Tomboy 1.13.5 on Windows 7 (I use tomboy at work on Windows, and at home on Linux); I downloaded the DLL using the tomboy add-in wiki and copied it to the add-in folder

C:\Users\myusername\AppData\Roaming\Tomboy\config\addins

and then restarted tomboy. Nothing happened - I don't see the add-in listed in Preferences > Add-ins

Is this add-in still working on recent tomboy versions?

I have huge notes and this add-in seems to be exactly what I was looking for.

I do not have access to a Windows machine. I suspect that the recent Tomboy upgrade broke compatibility with older add-ins. Do you have any other **add-in not by default** working? I think you should ask on Tomboy mailing list. You will get better answers from Windows users.

With Ubuntu, I suspect you use IBus for input methods. There is a bug in my add-in. I noticed it recently when I upgraded to 13.04. I must make an update.

Note that I started to use gnote, where the add-in is now more up-to-date. But I'll make a Tomboy update though.

For the Windows version, I had a long discussion with Tomboy developers. It seems that there is a problem with the latest GTK#. But it still does not explain why stock add-ins would work and others won't.

Hi, just to advise that the issue is still there, sadly. New laptop, Windows 7 enterprise, latest tomboy (1.15.1) running, this add-on still crashing when trying to open a note. I will post the debug in the dev mailing list.